tames the smile a little and looks back at me. “So why is that something you used to do?”
Because Ian was the one who talked me into it and who I did it with for two years.
“I just stopped about a year ago—just one of those things you fall out of.”
I get the feeling he doesn’t believe there’s not more to it than that, so I jump onto something else to distract from it.
“What about you?” I ask, turning around at the waist to give him my full attention. “What’s something crazy that you’ve done?”
Andrew purses his lips in thought, looking out at the road. We pass another semi and get around in front of it. The traffic is thinning out the farther away from the city we drive.
“I hood-surfed once—not so much crazy as it was stupid, though.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty stupid.”
He reaches his left hand up and puts the underside of his wrist into view. “I fell off the damn thing and sliced my wrist open on no telling what.” I peer in at the two-inch scar running along the skin from the bottom of the thumb bone and onto his arm. “I rolled across the road. Cracked my head open.” He points to the back right side of his head. “Got nine stitches there in addition to the sixteen on my wrist. I’ll never do that again.”
“Well, I would hope not,” I say sternly, still trying to see the scar through his brown hair.
He switches hands on the steering wheel and takes a hold of my wrist, sliding his index finger over the length of the top of mine so he can use his as a guide.
I pull closer, letting his hand guide mine.
“Right about … there,” he says when he finds it. “Do you feel it?”
His hand falls away from mine, but I watch it for a moment.
Coming back to the issue of his head, I look up and run the tip of my finger along an obvious uneven smooth strip of skin on his scalp and then I part his short hair away with my fingers. The scar is about an inch long. I run my finger over it one more time and reluctantly pull away.
“I imagine you have a lot of scars,” I say.
He smiles. “Not too many; got one on my back from when Aidan clipped me with a bicycle chain, swingin’ it around like a whip.” I wince, gritting my teeth. “And when I was twelve, had Asher riding on the handlebars of my bike. Hit a rock. Bike flipped forward and sent us both skidding across the concrete.” He points to his nose. “Broke my nose, but Asher broke an arm and had fourteen stitches on his elbow. Mom thought we’d been in a car wreck and were just lying about it to cover our asses.”
I’m still looking at his perfectly shaped nose; don’t see any evidence that it had ever been broken before.
“Got a weird L-shaped scar on my inner thigh,” he goes on and points to the general area. “Not gonna show you that one though.” He grins and puts both hands on the wheel.
I blush, because it really took me all of two seconds to start envisioning him dropping his pants to show me.
“That’s a good thing,” I laugh and then lean up toward the dashboard so I can pull my babydoll Smurfette shirt up just over my hip. I catch his eyes on me and it does something to my stomach, but I ignore that. “Camping one year,” I say, “jumped off these bluffs into the water and hit a rock—I almost drowned.”
Andrew frowns and reaches over, tracing the edges of the small scar on my hipbone. A shiver runs up my spine and through the back of my neck like something freezing racing through my blood.
I ignore that too, as much as I can.
I let my shirt fall back over my hip and I lean back against the seat.
“Well, I’m glad you didn’t drown.” His eyes warm up with his face.
I smile back at him. “Yeah, that would’ve sucked.”
“Definitely.”
I wake up after dark when Andrew slows down through a toll. I don’t know how long I slept, but I feel like I got a full night in, despite being curled up in the corner of the passenger’s seat with my head against the door. I should be trying to rub out a couple of stiff muscles like when I rode on the bus, but I feel good.
“Where are we?” I ask, cupping my hand over my mouth to cover the yawn.
“Middle of nowhere Wellington, Kansas,” he says. “You slept a long time.”
I rise up the rest of the way and let my eyes and body adjust to being awake again. Andrew pulls onto another road.
“I guess I did, better than I slept on the bus the entire trip from North Carolina to Wyoming.”
I look at the glowing blue letters on the car stereo: 10:14 p.m. A song is funneling low from the speakers. It makes me think of when I met him back on the bus. I smile to myself feeling like he made sure to keep it at a low level in the car while I slept.
“What about you?” I ask, turning around to see him, the darkness casting his face in partial shadow. “I feel weird offering because it’s your dad’s car, but I’m good to drive if you need me to.”
“Nah, you shouldn’t feel weird,” he says. “It’s just a car. A precious antique that my dad would string your ass up from a ceiling fan for if he ever knew you were behind the wheel, but I would totally let you drive it.” Even in the shadow, I see the right side of his mouth pull into a devious grin.
“Well, I’m not so sure I want to anymore.”
“He’s dying, remember? What’s he gonna do?”
“That’s not funny, Andrew.”
He knows it’s not. I’m fully aware of the game he’s playing with himself, always looking for anything to help him cope with what’s going on but coming up short. I just wonder how much longer he’ll be able to keep this up. The misplaced jokes will eventually run dry and he’s not going to know what to do with himself.
“We’ll stop at the next motel,” he says, turning onto another road. “I’ll get some shut-eye there.”
Then he glances over at me. “Separate rooms, of course.”
I’m glad he had that part sorted out so fast. I may be driving awkwardly across the U.S. alone with him, but I don’t think I can share a room with him, too.
“Great,” I say, stretching my arms out in front of me with my fingers locked. “I need a shower and to brush my teeth for about an hour.”
“No arguments there,” he jokes.
“Hey, your breath isn’t all that great, either.”
“I
